I'm a sweaty kind of guy no matter where I am. It really comes to a boil when I'm out dancing with my friends. Yep, I'm the sweaty guy soaking through his clothes in the middle of the dance floor. Is it a problem? I've found that not all men are fans of sweaty partners, may it be on the dance floor or other places. So do I have a problem?
“If you’re sweating so much that it makes you uncomfortable and affects your social life, schooling, or job, that’s when we would consider it a problem,” says Jason Miller, M.D., a board-certified dermatologist with CentraState Healthcare System in Freehold, New Jersey and a clinical instructor of dermatology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. – menshealth.com
As part of their "The Better Man Project," Men's Health give us these 7 tips for trying to deal with your sweating woes. For more elaboration on each topic, go over to the full menshealth.com story here.
There are two ways your daily cup of Joe can make you drip…
Easy on the Buffalo wings. Just like caffeine, spices can activate your brain’s neurotransmitters, causing you to sweat more…
If you’re only using deodorant to tame pesky pits, you’re doing it wrong…
Your pits aren’t the only parts perspiring this summer, as your junk can get pretty swampy, too…
6. Consider an Alternate Treatment
If changing your diet, wardrobe, and deodorant won’t cut it, speak to a doctor…
Is your problem worth taking drugs?
One thing they didn't say was lose weight. Bigger people sweat more, no? Shouldn't I lose some of my extra weight and then I would sweat less? Another Men's Health article elaborates on the weight issue.
The problem with previous studies is that body fat and aerobic fitness (VO2 max) tend to correlate with other factors. People with lots of body fat tend to weigh more—so is it the insulative properties of fat that matter, or is it simply being bigger and having to haul around more weight?
Similarly, people with high relative VO2 max (expressed as the maximum amount of oxygen their muscles can use per kilogram of body mass) tend be smaller overall—so maybe it’s the body size, not the fitness, that makes the difference.
To tease out the key factors, Cramer and Jay assembled 28 volunteers with widely varying fitness and body sizes and put them through a series of 60-minute cycling tests at different intensities while measuring sweat rates and changes in body temperature.
Sure enough, the change in core temperature was mostly explained by how much heat they generated in pedaling the bike per unit of body mass, with no “insulation effect.”
Heat production accounted for 50 percent of the variability in core temperature, and adding body fat percentage (which varied from 6.8 to 32.5 percent in the subjects) only explained another 2.3 percent of the variability.
This suggests that two people who weigh the same and pedal at the same pace should heat up at the same rate, even if one of them is short and fat and the other is tall and lean.
The same was true for overall sweat rate: body fat percentage explained only 1.3 percent of the variation.
…
The bottom line? If you’re trying to figure out whether you’re likely to overheat on a hot day, or how much you’re likely to sweat, simple rules of thumb about fatness and fitness aren’t that useful.
In the end, there’s so much variability in thermoregulatory responses that you have to rely on your own experiences and on simple tests like weighing yourself before and after a run to get a sense of how much fluid you’re losing. – menshealth.com
Fatness and fitness don't always dictate the sweat factor. Good to know.
What have you done to sweat less? What has worked for you?
If you have lost weight, do you find you sweat less? More?
h/t: menshealth.com